Dr. Catherine Laliberté

Stylistics and popular culture

• Stylistics
• Language in fiction
• Language in film
• Language in science fiction
• Readings on language in popular culture
  

Variation, change, and World Englishes

• Angloversals
• Key texts in sociolinguistics
• Analyzing variation and change
• African American (Vernacular) English
• North American Englishes
• Modality in English
• Models of World Englishes
• Describing accents
  

Others

• Methods in linguistics
• Introduction to linguistics

I supervise work in the areas of sociolinguistics, World Englishes, variation and change, stylistics, language in film, and language in pop culture. Email me if you'd like to discuss your project with me!

• African American English on streaming platforms: Copula variation in Kai Cenat’s Twitch speech
• Bilingual language acquisiton: A usage-based analysis of multi-word units in a German–English bilingual child
• “There is many criteria that I’m studying”: There-existentials in African Englishes
• Understanding the acceptability of offensive humor: A cognitive and linguistic approach
• Language in 'Sex Education'
• Language attitudes in Munich
• Language in West Side Story (2021)

Monograph

Laliberté, Catherine. 2023. Urban Panamanian English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g70

Research articles

• Laliberté, Catherine. 2026. "Investigating historical fiction in The TV Corpus". ICAME Journal 50(1). 37-51. DOI: doi.org/10.2478/icame-2026-0003

• Hackert, Stephanie, Catherine Laliberté, Robert Mailhammer, Diana Wengler & Ronia Zeidan. 2025. "Past marking in Australian Aboriginal English on Croker Island: Local vs. cross-variety patterns and principles". Journal of English Linguistics 53(1). 32-62. DOI: doi.org/10.1177/00754242241298990

• Laliberté, Catherine, Diana Wengler & Melanie Keller. 2024. "Linguistic strategies of estrangement in historical fiction: Bridgerton and Downton Abbey". Anglistik 35(3). 101-119. DOI: doi.org/10.33675/ANGL/2024/3/9

• Hackert, Stephanie, Catherine Laliberté & Diana Wengler. 2024. "Past inflection around the world: A cross-variety analysis of New Englishes". Lingua 307. DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103776

• Laliberté, Catherine, Diana Wengler & Melanie Keller. 2023. "'So, I trucked out to the border, learned to say ain’t, came to find work': the sociolinguistics of Firefly". Linguistics Vanguard 9(3). 275-286. DOI: doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0013

• Laliberté, Catherine. 2022. "A diachronic study of modals and semi-modals in Indian English newspapers". Journal of English Linguistics 50(2). 142-168. DOI: doi.org/10.1177/0075424222108724

• Dagmar Deuber, Stephanie Hackert, Eva Canan Hänsel, Alexander Laube, Mahyar Hejrani & Catherine Laliberté. 2022. "The norm orientation of English in the Caribbean: A comparative study of newspaper writing from ten countries." American Speech 97(3). 265-310. DOI: doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8791736
  

For Babel Magazine

• Laliberté, Catherine. 2024. "Panamanian English". Babel: the language magazine, Spring 2024.

• Laliberté, Catherine. 2022. "Review of 'Writing a war of words: Andrew Clark and the search for meaning in World War One' (2021) by Lynda Mugglestone". Babel: the language magazine, May 2022.
  

Book reviews

Laliberté, Catherine. 2025. "Sven Leuckert, Claudia Lange, Tobias Bernaisch and Asya Yurchenko, Indian Englishes in the twenty-first century: Unity and diversity in lexicon and morphosyntax (Elements in World Englishes). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 99. ISBN: 9781009323796." English Language and Linguistics (FirstView). DOI: doi.org/10.1017/S1360674324000364

11th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE), Klagenfurt (Austria), July 3rd-5th, 2026

(Im)politeness in telecinematic historical fiction: diachronic and stylistic insights

Parameters of Language Staging: Forms, Functions, and Multimodal Dynamics of staged discourse (PLS8), Nanterre (France), May 21st-22nd, 2026

Staged historicity in telecinematic fiction

Historical Fictions Research Network (HFRN) conference, Erlangen (Germany), Feb. 19th-20th, 2026

The emotional reception of staged historicity: a linguistic perspective

ICAME46, Vilnius (Lithuania), June 17th-21st, 2025

Investigating Historical Fiction in The TV Corpus [Work in progress]

ICAME45, Vigo (Spain), June 18th-22nd, 2024

With Diana Wengler:
Newswriting in the Caribbean diaspora: Americanization and other trends in The Panama Tribune (was awarded the ICAME John Sinclair Bursary)

The 7th meeting of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE 7), Brisbane (Australia), June 19th-22nd, 2023

With Stephanie Hackert, Robert Mailhammer, Diana Wengler & Ronia Zeidan:
Past tense marking in English on Croker Island: Implications for variation and change in English

Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Sept. 15-17th, 2022

• With Stephanie Hackert, Kimberly Nicole Carcamo Rodriguez, Diana Wengler & Melanie Keller: The "Panama letters": Reconstructing the roots of contemporary vernacular Englishes in the Caribbean

• With Melanie Keller, Diana Wengler, Kimberly Carcámo & Stephanie Hackert: The language of 21st century historical fiction: Bridgerton (2020) and Downton Abbey (2010-2015)
  
  

Anglistentag, Mainz (Germany), Sept. 2-5th, 2022.

With Melanie Keller & Diana Wengler:
Linguistic strategies of estrangement in Bridgerton

27th LIPP Symposium Language and Migration, Munich (Germany), 15th -17th November, 2021

Language Shift among West Indian Panamanians

Workshop Corpus Approaches to Science Fiction, ICAME42, Dortmund (Germany), Aug. 18th, 2021

With Melanie Keller & Diana Wengler:
“So I trucked out to the border, learned to say ain’t, came to find work”: The sociolinguistics of Firefly

SCL 2020 Biennal Conference, St. Augustine (Trinidad and Tobago), Aug. 2nd-9th, 2020 (cancelled due to COVID-19)

Language shift among Panamanians of West Indian descent

Forum Junge Englische Linguistik in Bayern (FJUEL), Bayreuth (Germany), Sept. 12th, 2019

Language shift in Panama: Some case studies

19th Annual Conference of the Association of Portuguese and Spanish-lexified Creoles & Summer Conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Lisbon (Portugal), June 18th, 2019

• From woz fi to was to? A Creole modal feature in Caribbean Englishes

• With Stephanie Hackert: The “Panama letters”: A linguistic analysis of personal recollections of West Indian laborers in the construction of the Panama Canal
  
  

Forum Junge Englische Linguistik in Bayern (FJUEL), Munich (Germany), Sept. 14th, 2018

Caribbean English on Pacific shores: the Silver People of Panama City

New Ways of Analyzing Variation 5 – Asia Pacific 5 (NWAV- AP5), Brisbane (Australia), Feb. 2nd, 2018

With Robert Mailhammer, Stephanie Hackert & Ronia Zeidan:
A multivariate analysis of past tense marking in Aboriginal English on Croker Island

Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) Annual Conference, Sydney (Australia), Dec. 5th, 2017

With Robert Mailhammer, Stephanie Hackert & Ronia Zeidan:
Past tense marking in English on Croker Island: A multivariate analysis